ENGL 10103 (Group 7): Free Write Week 7

For this assignment, I read "Aggression from the North" on the PBS website, this account was know as the "White Paper". This came about by President Kennedy putting together a group of Vietnamese to travel to South Vietnam in order to get a first hand account of what was truly happening in Vietnam. I chose the same topic for my alternate primary source from Vassar College, The PBS article starts out the article by saying "South Vietnam is fighting for its life against a brutal campaign of terror and armed attack inspired, directed, supplied, and controlled by the Communist regime in Hanoi" (par.1). The account from Vassar said the report recommended, "The introduction of large-scale American advisers to help stabilize Diem's government to defeat the CV and crush the NLF[National Liberation Front]" (White Paper). The NLF was created by both Communists and non-Communist forces in an umbrella that only had a few important goals that they were fighting for. Their many idea was to stand in the way of Ngo Dinh Diem. They considered themselves as a third party in the matter, they were independent of the communist party and it was main made up of non-Communist members. The NLF was even praised by main anti-war activists.

The reason that I give a synopsis of the research I have done is due to the point that I wanted to bring across... CLARITY. That looking back at the relationship of Vietnam and the United States have had is really unclear and doesn't really make sense. The "White Paper" recommends of an all out attack of United States forces in Vietnam, but White house advisers say that the United States should just pull all forces out of Vietnam completely. President Kennedy did not listen to any of those he decided that the United States will partially send troops into Vietnam. This does not really make any sense once again clarity has come into question. What is the point of only sending in a few troops? Why not send in everything that the United States had so it would have been a quick and decisive victory instead of dragging out a war for eleven years. With the lack of Clarity from the United States and the three different sides on the Vietnamese end, the communist, the non-communist, and the NLF that is not communist but against the non-communist president, brings the situation into a stalemate were everyone just ends up killing everyone else. I wanted to point this out because an accumulation of battles makes up a war and in "The Things They Carried" several memories of battles and the reason why U.S. troops were over in Vietnam were not clear.

In How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O'Brien reiterates over and over how the war looses its clarity and how everything blends together. One of the best quotes in this chapter is when O'Brien generalizes about what war true is, he says: "War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead" (80). This shows the reader the clarity of war. How can war be all of these things? There is no deeper meaning in war than dumb people that are tired of each other that want to just kill each other instead of talking things out or just leaving things alone. Later in the chapter, O'Brien later writes about the clarity of war one more time, he says, "Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy civility into savagery" (82). This shows that if there was clarity, a purpose, a meaning, that it was lost in the bloodshed of young men.

In conclusion, there is not clarity in war.